Conversion storytelling is the practice of personalization to build strong bonds between brands and customers. It’s a variation of storytelling that focuses on driving conversions in digital marketing.
Tactically speaking, conversion storytellers create ad narratives that flow through each touch point. They move targeted ads into landing pages that match the message. Each landing page continues an ad’s story and aesthetic, increasing ad relevance and the likelihood of conversion.
How to implement conversion storytelling in your campaigns
Let’s explore the exact process it takes to build a conversion storytelling narrative:
Define your goals and explore narrative concepts
The first step is to align your persuasive narratives at the conceptual stage. In this stage, ground yourself and establish your goals by asking these questions:
- What is the product or service you’re advertising?
- Who is the audience or persona you’re speaking to with this campaign?
- Why do they care? What are they trying to achieve?
- How does your product or service solve the problem better than any other?
- How will achieving this solution helps the audience feel successful? What’s at stake if they don’t succeed?
The answers to these questions will help you keep your narrative focused on only what matters to your specific audience. Remember: An effective conversion story is tightly focused on a specific goal and audience segment. For example, Sasquatch Boots has identified what’s most important for their target audience (real backpackers) i.e., comfortable boots that can withstand the elements.
Identify your audience segments and develop personas for them
To predict which stories will be most effective, you need to know your audience. Start by identifying the most valuable segments of your audience and build a persona for each one.
Developing audience personas requires careful customer research. In doing so, you’ll need to consider a wide range of data, including:
- Demographics (e.g., age, gender, income)
- Psychographics (e.g., values, attitudes, interests)
- Firmographics (e.g., company, industry, title)
- Geographic (e.g., city, state, country)
- Behavioral (e.g., page views, downloads, signups)
- Transactional (e.g., purchase history)
Facebook and Google, have tools for creating custom audience segments based on these factors. Carefully targeted audiences allow you to speak to each potential customer almost as if you were having a one-on-one conversation.
Build relevant narratives for each persona
Once you’ve identified your core audience personas and learned what inspires conversion actions out of that audience, it’s time to start crafting your narratives.
You may be familiar with the classic storytelling structure. Let’s examine.
In a conventional story, the protagonist begins their journey, experiences challenges and tension through rising action that culminates in a climax, then ends in a resolution that leaves them in a better place than where they started.
How do we translate this structure into an advertising campaign? We need to start with the basics.
- Tension: What is this persona trying to achieve? What problems do they wish to overcome?
- Solution: How does your product or service give the persona what they want?
- Resolution: When you have resolved their tension, how should the persona feel?
Surely, you’ve considered these questions before, so let’s try an exercise. Write a short, one- to two-sentence story about your product or service and how it helps a particular persona. Here’s an example.
- Persona: Active backpacker millennials
- Want: Boots that are comfortable, durable, and ready to wear
- Emotion: Challenge, adventure, confidence
Put narrative flows in place across your ads and landing pages
We’ve discussed how to view your advertising strategy from a storytelling perspective. You have all the pieces of a story: character, audience, and conflict.
Now you need to put it all together.
The landing page is the driving force behind your campaign’s narrative. Take another look at the graph. You’ll see that between the start (ad) and climax (conversion), most of the story takes place on the landing page. But your landing page can only tell one story. If your page experience isn’t unique for each persona, your characters are much less likely to complete their conversion.
The narrative flow serves as a blueprint for the story the landing page will move forward. To create the story, you will draw on data, storytelling principles, and creative insights to answer these questions:
- Who are we talking to?
- What are we talking about?
- What is their problem?
- How do we solve it?
- How do they feel once we’ve solved it?
This copy can serve as the hero text that will appear first when your page loads. Its core goal is to quickly reaffirm your ad’s emotional messaging.
The clean design and friendly dog that greets the visitor on Ruggable’s page capitalizes on pet owners’ feelings about their furry friends.
- Images forge an emotional connection with an ad and landing page geared to pet owners
- Headline, and CTA copy create an emotional connection with the target audience
- Videos of easy cleanup address a common pain point
- Multiple CTAs offer paths to conversion at each step
For a deeper dive into the world of building high-converting landing pages, check out our ebook on the subject.
Analyze results, experiment, and continually improve
Today, ad platforms like Google and Facebook dominate the pre-click stage of the ad funnel. But the newfound ability to slice and dice data into minute user demographics has transformed advertising. When you pair data with innovations in machine learning and experience design, the results skyrocket.
Advertisers recognize that more personalization drives better results, but the cost of scaling it is tough, even for experienced marketers. Building and maintaining custom landing pages is costly and time-consuming. And not every company has the headcount or budget for a web development team. Plus, there are added demands like customer data insights and conversion UX design. These issues have led many advertisers to settle for poor returns on their ad spends and mediocre results.
Instapage uses conversion storytelling to drive results, and if you need support scaling your landing page experiences, Instapage can help.
Instapage delivers a strategic, proven framework for conversion storytelling that can increase ROAS and conversions in any industry. Our easy-to-use platform quickly creates relevant landing pages for each of your audiences. That means you can avoid wasting ad spend.
See this in action today by signing up for an Instapage 14-day trial.
